player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone who didn't die here.
WHAT: A sad week.
WHEN: Approx Solas 21-30
WHERE: Granitefell, the Gallows, wherever else you want.
NOTES: A second log for this plot. Additional posts/logs will cover the time travel/fix-it components—this one is for the time period where no one knows that's a possibility.

Those who fly out to Granitefell arrive a few hours after dawn to find a smoldering gravesite and fewer than twenty living souls, Riftwatch's five included. The survivors have done what they can in the intervening hours, but there's still work to be done to tend to wounds, move the bodies—especially the delicate ones—and help the remaining villagers, mostly children, build pyres to see to their own dead before they're relocated somewhere safer. Somewhere with roofs that aren't collapsed or still lightly burning.

Carts to carry Riftwatch's dead won't arrive for some time afterward, and bringing them back takes just as long. It's a few days before they're returned to the Gallows, preserved from decay as best everyone could manage but nonetheless in poor shape from the battle. Pyres are an Andrastian tradition for a reason—to prevent possession—but burials and mummification aren't so unheard of that anyone will be barred from seeing to their loved ones as they see fit.

Before, during, and after any funerary rites, there are absences. Empty beds, empty offices, voices missing from the crystals, pancakes missing from Sundays. Belongings that need to be sorted and letters that need to be written. And, perhaps most pressingly, work that still needs to be done, including the work left behind by those who can no longer follow through on their own projects or tie up their own loose ends, as the world and its war keep moving steadily onward as if nothing happened at all.

Comments

[portalling]

“I mostly worked the carriages and the survivors, so I missed the details,” Strange confesses, grim as they walk along, “but they do tend to do that. Tevinter.”

It wasn’t the clean convenience of the main battlefield he’d been in back home: a wide-open field, distant from any living centers, only full of combatants who had explicitly decided to join the fight against Thanos. Civilians muddied things. Made it more complicated. Made the aftermath more gruesome.

Dead children. God.

Since it seems like the topic is on Nina’s mind, like something persistent and caught in her teeth, he provides: “I’ve only been in open combat like that once in Thedas. Earlier this year, they sacked the city of Starkhaven. We evacuated the city, strove to get all the civilians out safely. Not everyone made it.” Because of course not everyone would. He had slogged through the mud, had tried to save as many as possible.

“They don’t hold back. Is what I’ve gathered.”

[prelest]

Had he been there too? Cleaning up the battlefield? She'd missed him in the midst of all of it. Which, given his flamboyant outfit, really shows just how much her focus had been narrowed to the bloody work.

"Do you know why?" She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "I know that's a silly question. There's no reason why. But - do they give some justification for it? We're heathens, or we're fighting some guerrilla war of attrition against them - "

She realizes as those words are out of her mouth that she's used the word we. Well, now there's really no question that she knows what side she's on.

"Generally, people only act like monsters when someone convinces them that they're actually fighting something much worse."

[portalling]

As they finish making their way down the hallway, Strange pushes open the over-large door with his shoulder, holds it for her as they walk into the dining hall.

“With the caveat that I am of course also a rifter, so I’m putting it together too and catching up on decades of geo-political history,”

but perhaps that gives him the more distant vantage point to look at it, with no particular attachments to any nation.

“About five years ago, the Tevinter Imperium’s leader was deposed, and replaced with a puppet who’s really just in the pocket of the guy we’re fighting — Corypheus, that ancient undead wizard man, however we want to refer to him. A local or someone in Diplomacy would know more of the details, but the gist I get is that Tevinter might have been reasoned with, before. But with Corypheus secretly at the helm, he’s been pushing hard on the Imperium’s preexisting ambitions. Their goal seems to be mage supremacy over the other southern nations. Which might even make a little bit of sense, hearing some of the ways mages are treated down here.”

They’re standing in the Gallows, after all.

“But, still. Wartime atrocity and oppressing others isn’t the answer. And Corypheus has his own goals behind it, for power and immortality. Y’know, standard megalomaniacal villain shit.”

(He might only be a hop and a skip and a jump from the Darkling and his Second Army, really.)

[prelest]

"Yes, I know the type," Nina murmurs, and thinks a little bit about the Darkling and a little bit about Kaz Brekker.

She thinks about that story as they gather cups and step up to serve themselves food. She does suppose that the Darkling used monstrous tactics against the otkazat'sya - Ravkans themselves, even, when they crossed him. It feels less terrible than what she saw here, but maybe that's just the distance of time dulling the horror of the civil war.

"Is immortality something that's - oh - common here?" She gives a little wave of her hand, half in apology for the clumsiness of the question. "Could he become all-powerful?"

[portalling]

“I suspect not common as such, it’s not like we’re constantly tripping over ancient monsters — but also not impossible, since he’s already very old. Centuries, I think, and he’s more powerful than any of the other darkspawn. So it’s a plausible concern that he might extend that further.”

Strange ladles himself a serving of one-pot stew which has been on a slow simmer all day (a little questionable, maybe, but it gets the job done), then refills his wine and sits down at one of the long tables beside her.

“It’s quite the introduction you’ve had, coming here.”

[prelest]

She tilts her head to the side in agreement. Being thrust into this, all this grief and pain, has been miserable. And it's been miserable having no one to complain to or confide in. Back home, there'd have been someone she could lean up against and vent her frustrations - or who'd rub her back while she screamed into a pillow or something - but here, there's no one who isn't hurt worse than her. She can't complain to any of them.

But since he's inviting it, at least a little, she does admit, "Even under the best of circumstances, I'd be missing my friends. And, at the moment, no one's really in a place to make me feel less lonely."

She takes a spoonful of the stew. There's some pleasure to be found in it, even as poorly-made as it is - yes, it's all broken down into a homogenous sludge, but it's warm and filling, and there are herbs in there she doesn't quite know. It's interesting, even if it's not especially good.

"It's certainly not the greatest tragedy in the world right now, but it is a bit of a tragedy still."

[portalling]

“Certainly the biggest loss I’ve experienced here. Particularly since the world gets— smaller, living in a place like this. We travel the continent for missions, we take shortcuts through the Eluvians to cross vast distances, but the Gallows still becomes intimate. A small scale. You grow to recognise all the faces.”

And now their world is decidedly even smaller: the rooms quieter, the hallways emptier. Strange hasn’t even gone back to the Research workroom yet, and he finds himself dreading the prospect; he doesn’t want to see Cosima’s desk abandoned mid-work, as if she’s just stepped out for lunch and will be back any moment.

“It takes a while. The loneliness,” he admits. “As a rifter. Even if there are glimmers of familiarity, it’s still disorienting being cut adrift from everything you know. But there are at least many of us here.”

Out of sheer necessity lest their anchors eat them alive, but still: it counts. All of those rifters clustered together in one location like blood clotting in a wound.

[prelest]

A rueful little smile lifts one of her cheeks. "I can't say I'm glad anyone else is going through pain, as well," she says. "But it does make it a little more bearable to not suffer alone." But then she hesitates, and says, "Or maybe it makes it worse. I don't know. Maybe it would be nice to just swim in self-pity and have everyone fuss over me because I'm the saddest person in the world."

It'd probably actually be annoying. But the theory of it sounds quite nice, and so she won't think too hard about what the reality would be.

"I heard that some version of us continues on," she says. It's a question; she searches his face for confirmation. "That back home, there's a version of us that's continuing what we were doing."

[portalling]

Whatever Nina’s looking for, the man’s expression doesn’t give immediate confirmation either way, just a kind of glassy contemplation. “That is what I hear,” he says, thinking of Tony, the dreams he’d had of what happened to him in their other world —

“You might dream of your life back home. And then other people from home might arrive later through a rift, and confirm that that’s what happened in the interim. But even then, I’m not certain if that’s conclusive.”

He takes another sip of his wine. With some physical distance from the entrance hall, he finds himself relaxing and he can settle into this topic instead; it might be an existential quandary, but it’s still somehow better than the dead bodies waiting for them. This is preferable. This is more like an academic discussion:

“Where I come from, there’s the concept of the multiverse: an uncountable number of different worlds with different versions of yourself, with differences both small and vast. Your dreams are often glimpses into their lives. I’ve had a few dreams like that, walking in their footsteps. So even if your dream here seems like it’s a glimpse into your own continuing life, what’s to say it’s not one that’s merely very similar? One where you had blueberry pie that morning instead of apple, but everything else was identical. That’s another world. So I still think it’s possible that we can step back into our own shoes if we return, but,”

a tip of a shoulder, a half-shrug,

“It’s not like we can fully confirm or deny either way. We’re here for as long as we’re here.”